An absorbing travel narrative about defining and facing the limitations and opportunities of midlife.
In this travelogue, a middle-aged couple takes a road trip through a number of national parks.
Having built a successful and happy life on the island of Maui, author Neal and her husband, Mike, were facing life and career milestones, with Neal approaching 50, and Mike about 60. Both were feeling “the gaunt wolf of age…chewing at the backs of our legs.” As Mike, a woodworker and photographer, was beginning his recovery from a major health crisis and Neal teetered on the edge of leaving her rewarding but stressful job as a child/adolescent therapist, the two decided to mark their individual transitions with a monthlong road trip through several national parks. They started close to home with a strenuous backpacking trip into a volcanic crater in Maui’s Haleakalā National Park. From there, they traveled to the more active lava flows of Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park on Hawaii’s Big Island and even further afield to mainland national parks, from the spires and slot canyons of Utah’s Bryce Canyon and Zion to the moss-hung forests and rocky beaches of Washington’s Olympic National Park. Each landscape inspired them while also providing both physical and emotional challenges. As narrator of the adventure, Neal intersperses her account with reflections on her own upbringing, running wild on the beaches of Kauai as the child of hippie parents, and her work as a “kid whisperer,” a therapist for troubled children. The result is a dynamic, engrossing portrait of a woman in midlife on the cusp of a major life decision. The story unfolds neatly as a journey of self-examination, struggles, and joys and leaves the reader with a longing for adventure and an appetite for more of Neal’s writing.
An absorbing travel narrative about defining and facing the limitations and opportunities of midlife.Pub Date: March 11, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-9896883-9-0
Page Count: 396
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing, rigorously documented study of a 20th-century literary trailblazer.
A penetrating exploration of the life and work of the acclaimed novelist, memoirist, and pioneering figure in gay culture.
While Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) may be best known for Goodbye to Berlin, which drew on his experiences in Weimar-era Berlin and inspired the musical Cabaret, this new biography by Bucknell, director of the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, astutely highlights the considerable merits of his other novels and candid autobiographical works. The author renders a sweeping portrait of Isherwood's remarkable life journey, during which he forged indelible connections with many of the era's preeminent literary and artistic figures. Early on, Isherwood moved within an influential circle of writers that included W.H. Auden, E.M. Forster, and Steven Spender. In 1939, he moved to Hollywood and pursued screenwriting, while also initiating a spiritual conversion to Vedanta under the guidance of Indian monk Swami Prabhavananda. Over the ensuing years, his vast circle expanded, bringing in Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and David Hockney, among others. Bucknell dedicates perhaps too many pages to Isherwood's early years, privileged upbringing, Cambridge education, and elements of his complex family dynamics (including his father's death in World War II and his suffocating relationship with his mother), but this detailed exploration lays the foundation for her explorations of her subject’s later writing and the complexities that shaped his intimate relationships, particularly his romances with various men at different stages of his life, most enduringly with artist Don Bachardy. Throughout, Bucknell urgently draws attention to Isherwood’s courageous life as an openly gay man and his vital role in advancing gay liberation through his writing: "He saw from his career's outset that he must make homosexuality attractive to mainstream audiences if he was to change their view of it, and he worked to do this in all his writing in different ways.”
An engrossing, rigorously documented study of a 20th-century literary trailblazer.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9780374119362
Page Count: 848
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
A provocative and original examination of the flaws in mental health treatment.
Fay's incisive, wide-ranging debut explores her decadeslong immersion in the mental health system.
Beginning when she was a teenager, Fay was diagnosed with six different mental illnesses, sometimes one by one, sometimes in combination, and often based on the skimpiest of evidence. Therapists and physicians concluded that she was suffering from anorexia, major depressive disorder, anxiety disorder, ADHD, OCD, and bipolar disorder. They prescribed medications accordingly, and Fay dutifully swallowed both the diagnoses and the pills—and then found it nearly impossible to extricate herself from either. The narrative, justifiably soaked with anger but also darkly funny at points, does not follow the course of the usual mental health memoir, in which the subject finally receives and responds to the “correct” analysis of her problems and lives happily-ever-after. Instead, Fay, still troubled, still medicated, stepped out of the loop of therapy and began to refute its basic tenets. The author boldly combines three strands: an account of her trip down the rabbit hole of the mental health system, where she tried valiantly to persuade herself to accept diagnoses that didn’t seem to correspond to her actual life; a dynamic critique of the various incarnations of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which serves as a guidebook for many clinicians; and, unexpectedly but beguilingly, analyses of the ways punctuation can reveal and structure thought. While criticism of the DSM is not new, Fay's position as an insider suffering from the results of its application as a method of analysis gives her a unique perspective. Sharply personal and impeccably detailed, the book is bound to raise questions in the minds of readers diagnosed with any number of disorders about the validity of trying to cram individual experience into what Fay contends are essentially imaginary categories.
A provocative and original examination of the flaws in mental health treatment.Pub Date: March 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-306868-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
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